Cool little Ozark fish...

[Al Agnew]

I've been working on scientific fish illustrations.  What I've been doing is taking photos of various fish, putting them in Photoshop, and enhancing them by sharpening the scale patterns and fin structures, removing any gleam or reflections on the fish, and going over the colors in each scale to make them as sharp as possible while still looking like the real fish.  Pretty much it's like taking a photo and doing a digital painting on top of it.  Here are some cool little Meramec River species:

 

The top one is the slender madtom.  Next is bleeding shiner, male in spawning colors and female, next is rainbow darter, male in spawning colors and female, finally northern studfish, male and female.

[mzrealfish]

Great stuff Al!

[Phil Lilley]

Those are incredible!

[jdmidwest]

Pretty sharp.

[Chief Grey Bear]

Those look great!

My son caught a male Studfish years ago.  Stunningly gorgeous! He raised a Madtom for a couple of years. 

[timinmo]

Al,they look great.  As you already know.  I too caught a Studfish, years ago on the upper Huzzah around Dillard. 

[Mitch f]

Very nice

[fishinwrench]

Very cool!  

Are you gonna do a Niangua Darter ?

[Al Agnew]

My original goal was to do some representative fish species for the book on the Meramec river system.  I've gotten about 15 fish done at this point, working on them now and then.  Since the Niangua darter isn't found in that system, it'll be a while before I get to doing one.

The northern studfish is a very common small fish in Ozark streams.  Most just know them as topminnows or topwater minnows, though they aren't in the minnow family but the killifish family.  They are the small fish you see in slow, shallow water areas of the rivers, swimming just under the surface.  

I'm waiting for spring to really arrive, when it becomes easier to seine a lot of the small fish species in the creeks and rivers.  My goal is to get decent photos of all the species I can, and convert each species to one of these illustrations.  I've gotten photos over the years of all the larger game fish species, but not of a lot of the darters and minnows.

[Deadstream]

13 minutes ago, Al Agnew said:

convert each species to one of these illustrations

Al , I hope that you finish this book project and sell it in a coffee table book format. Or at least a book with nice plates. Amazing work.